Madam Speaker, it is pretty clear that the hon. member for Saint-Léonard is not very knowledgeable about surgical procedures. We found out not long ago that he is a chartered accountant, and I think he should have stuck to his speciality. If he looked at what is happening in Canada and Quebec from the accountant's point of view, he would realize that Canada has the largest foreign debt of any country today.
Current interest rates are not going down, because 45 per cent of Canada's debt is covered by foreign loans and lenders are starting to have a substantial part of their portfolio invested in Canadian loans. According to the last budget, the government will have a deficit for many years and it will be extremely difficult to control government spending when in addition to being unable to manage areas that are a federal responsibility, the federal government regularly decides to encroach on jurisdictions belonging to the provinces, in the belief it can do better.
This week in Le Devoir , Lise Bissonnette gave the following analysis. The federal government has decided to intervene in literacy programs. Quebec already spends $63 million, and now the federal government is going to add $2.5 million! Two and a half million, with probably one million spent on advertising, with a lengthy press release from the Department of Foreign Affairs-does the federal government already consider Quebec to be a foreign country?-plus the whole federal-provincial bureaucracy, because in the final instance, after a lot of discussion, the federal government acknowledged this came under Quebec's jurisdiction and that it was necessary to co-ordinate approaches and agree on certain criteria. A host of officials met for months to try and agree on these criteria.
And after all that, about $25,000 per school board in Quebec may be spent on literacy training!
My goodness, $25,000! This is less than the annual salary of a teacher, but the federal government will probably spend more than $2.5 million on advertising to give $25,000 per school board. How can someone who is a professional accountant lecture us on surgical procedures? Give us a break! I hope that in his next speech, the hon. member for Saint-Léonard will stick to dollars and cents.